YouSaid · the spoken record

Sam Walton

lines on the record: 91
first: 2022-02-28
most recent: 2022-02-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“And they turned them down flat. So he's like, oh, you're not interested. I guess I have to do it myself. So that's what he's talking about there. Had we been the offshoot of a large corporation the way I wanted to be, we might have never tried the Harrisons or the Rogers or the Springdale's. He's just listening, all these little towns that they opened up Walmarts in the early days. It turned out that the first big lesson we learned was that there was much, much more business out there in small-town America than anybody, including me, had ever dreamed of.”
2022-02-28 · Founders · #234 Sam Walton: Made In America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then he just got this fantastic idea constraints are your friend. Listen to this. I can tell you this though. After a lifetime of swimming upstream, so that's his, he uses that term swim upstream all the time. It's being a maverick. It's going against the grain. It's thinking independently. That's the way you can think of what he means by that. I am convinced that one of the real secrets to Walmart's phenomenal success has been that very tendency. Many of our best opportunities were created out of necessity. The things that we were forced to learn and do because we started out underfinanced and undercapitalized in these remote small”
2022-02-28 · Founders · #234 Sam Walton: Made In America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Things like my church, my family, and my civic leadership, and even politics, I'm pretty conservative, but for some reason in business, I have always been driven to buck the system, to innovate, to take things beyond where they've been. In the marketplace, I have always been a maverick who enjoys shaking things up and creating a little anarchy.”
2022-02-28 · Founders · #234 Sam Walton: Made In America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“His default optimist. I was feeling pretty good after we got those first three stores up and running. I knew it would work. And so Sam's going to elaborate on this. He knew it. He said everybody else was skeptical, but I knew it. I knew we were onto something. I knew it in my bones that it was going to work. But at the time, most folks, including my own brother, were pretty skeptical of the whole concept. They thought Walmart was just another one of Sam Walton's crazy ideas. It was totally unproven at the time, but it was really what we'd been doing all along, experimenting, trying to do something different, educating ourselves as to what was going on in the retail industry and trying to stay ahead of those trends. This is a big contradiction in my makeup that I don't completely understand to this day. This is so, to me, really important, the fact that he understood and he accepted without trying to say, I know why I feel this way, I can't explain why I feel this way. I just know I'm a complex individual just like everybody else is. And he says, this is a big contradiction to my makeup that I don't completely understand to this day. In many of my core values.”
2022-02-28 · Founders · #234 Sam Walton: Made In America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so this is where he gets the idea to start the first Walmart. It's not called Walmart yet. He says nobody wanted to gamble on that first Walmart. I had to put up 95% of the dollars to know I left myself there as they never do. First you believe and then you work on making others believe too. And this is where he puts up everything he has. He goes all in. Helen and I had to sign all the notes along with me and her statement allowed us to borrow more than I could have a loan. We pledge houses and property, everything we had. And from the time those dog gone walmarts opened until almost today, it has been a little challenging. So this is, I think, the next like 10 to 12 years up until from the very first day. So the very first Walmart up until the IPO that entire period. That would be what? How many years? I think it's eight years. Actually, it's eight years. Wrong. I was wrong. It's not 15 or 10 or 15. So it's eight years. He's in debt up to his eyeballs. The reason he finally decides he did not want to run a public company. The reason he decided IPO was like, I got to get a debt. This is killing me. So the building store is a...”
2022-02-28 · Founders · #234 Sam Walton: Made In America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even if the dollar amount is low, memory said, This doesn't make any sense. Let's cut our margins and we'll increase the volume and then we'll make more money. So this is, he's transitioning from the mindset of a higher margin store to make money on volume, cut the prices. And really the way it says is buy it low, stack it high, and sell it cheap. And so he says, I started running all over the country, studying the concept, and he goes, I went to California where sole price had started FedMart in 1955. And what he realizes is this idea is starting to spread. It is not where he is at now, but it is inevitable. And so he realizes, like, if I stay here, I'm dead. So I have no choice but to evolve. We really only had two choices left. Stay in the variety store business, which I knew was going to be hit hard by the discounting wave of the future or open a discount store. Of course, I wasn't about to sit here and become a target.”
2022-02-28 · Founders · #234 Sam Walton: Made In America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Store that it didn't really amount to much. After 15 years in 1960, we were doing only $1.4 million in sales in 15 stores. So he is essentially saying, hey, there is a limit to this idea. If I don't keep experimenting to find a way through this, this is really the ceiling, the limit I can do. And this is, at this point, he's looking for an opportunity. This is the first time he's going to mention the person that he said he has stole more ideas from than anybody else. That is sole price. I read his biography on Back on Founders number 107. Sol price is by far the most influential retailer that has ever lived. The people that took ideas from him that built massive multi, hundreds of billions of dollars of companies, people like Jeff Bezos, Sam Walton, Jim Senegal, the founder of Costco, Bernie Marcus, the founder of Home Depot, all of them talk about, hey, I stole this idea from Sol Price. And so he says I started running all over the country studying the concept. This is the discount concept. He is not a discounter yet. They still have pretty high margins.”
2022-02-28 · Founders · #234 Sam Walton: Made In America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Andrew knew that. Carnegie knew that 150 years ago. That note is all over this book on my second read through because he talks about this, not only in planes and he studies traffic patterns, figures out where's the best place to put a new store. He'll go and check out his competitors. He'll fly over his competitors' stores and count the cars. He also uses this when they're building out their distribution center. It just appears over and over again. So it's obviously very important. Something he's saying about this time that he's doing now and he does later on with Walmart. Whatever money we made in one store, we'd put in another store and we'd just keep going. He would just let it compound. And then he's kind of wrapping up this whole period for us. These are really a summary of the years before he started Walmart. That whole period, which scarcely gets any attention from most people studying us, was really very, very, very successful. In 15 years time, we had become the largest independent variety store operator in the United States. But the business itself seemed a little limited. The volume was so little per”
2022-02-28 · Founders · #234 Sam Walton: Made In America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I read the autobiography of Andrew Carnegie, and I've mentioned this phrase I'm about to tell you over and over again, I can't tell you how many times I'm reading rereading Sam Walton's biography, right? I had read Sam Walton's, excuse me, autobiography first, then 60 books later I read Andrew Carnegie's book. Now 160-something books.”
2022-02-28 · Founders · #234 Sam Walton: Made In America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Me and said a tornado had hit the Ruskin store. Why is that important? This was our best store. The one we were really excited about, and it was there one minute and gone the next. I think you can predict his next sentence, based on what you and I have already talked about. We just rebuilt it and got back at it. So something Sam talks about that gave him a massive advantage of everybody else is that he was a pilot. This is not a jet. These are like little small, little planes. And so he realized, because he's got, at this point in the story, he's got tons of stores. So he's just driving all the time. And so he says, with all the places I had to visit, I was driving too much to have time for anything else. So I began to wonder if maybe flying wouldn't be the best way to go. I love the little two-seater plan plane because it'd go 100 miles an hour and I could get to places in a straight line. Once I took to the air, I caught store fever. So I don't think when many people think of Walmart the first thing that comes to mind is technology.”
2022-02-28 · Founders · #234 Sam Walton: Made In America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was about twenty years in the making, and we're still not into the Walmart, but he's talking about looking back at this time from the perspective of somebody who had already built Walmart into this gigantic company about these years that are so important. And he says, I remember those days mostly as a time of always looking around for ideas and items that would make our store stand out. A few paragraphs later, he reiterates his point. Most everything I've done I've copied from somebody else. That's exactly what Charlie Munger said about him, right? Most everything I've done, I've copied from somebody else's addlie felt made a big difference to, but with more fanaticism, it made me think of when I read the fantastic autobiography. It's Founder's number 184. It's the founder of Four Seasons. Izzy Sharp. And in that book, he talks about the idea. He's like Ray Croc was asked, Ray Croc, the founder of McDonald's, he was asked why they were.”
2022-02-28 · Founders · #234 Sam Walton: Made In America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pick myself up. I got knocked down. I picked myself up. I'll do it again. I think that's the absolute perfect mentality to have. And look, look how he has to start over. See, he finds a store in Bentonville. He says, now I had a store to run again. And even though it didn't do but $32,000 a year compared to the $250,000 he was doing at Newport, right? So he's way back. It didn't matter that much because I had big plans. And then there's just a short paragraph. He's talking about all the research he does. Obviously, I've told you over and over again. He's constantly looking for any kind of edge or any kind of advantage that he complied to his business, right? And he does this all the time. But there's just a, I'm going to read this short paragraph. And then there's three highlights that just tell you everything about Sam Walton and the way he approached his craft. So he says, I read an article about these two Ben Franklin stores up in Minnesota that had gone to self-service. So he's using the word self-service in today's time we might think of there's no cashiers like self-checkout. That's not what he's talking about. He's talking about that there used to be in these like...”
2022-02-28 · Founders · #234 Sam Walton: Made In America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So now back to this book, and really what Sam's about to tell us here is that problems are opportunities and workflows. Problems are just opportunities in workflows. I've never been one to dwell on reverses, and I didn't do so then. It's not just a corney saying that you can make a positive out of almost any negative if you work at it hard enough. I've always thought of problems as challenges, and this one wasn't any different. I didn't dwell on my disappointment. The challenge at hand was simple enough to figure out. I had to pick myself up and get on with it. To do it all over again, but better this time. And so imagine dedicating five years of your life, you take a store that was doing nothing, now it's doing 250,000, it's making tons of 30 to $40,000 a year in profit, which is an insane number considering this point of history that we're in. And now this is actually how he winds up in Bentonville, Arkansas, where obviously Walmart is still headquartered to this day. And look at how far, I mean, I just love this guy's resolve, his determination, his persistence. I think what he was just telling us, like, okay, that's fine. I did it once.”
2022-02-28 · Founders · #234 Sam Walton: Made In America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In. Everything it took to run a store. We had to keep expenses to a minimum. That is where it started years ago. Our money was made by controlling expenses. I got to read that again because it's so important. Our money was made by controlling expenses. That and Sam always being ingenious. He never stopped trying to do something different. So a few years into building up this store, he actually gets a visit from the guy that was working at JCPenney who said, hey, you know, Sam, I don't think you're cut off for retail. And so it says, the manager told Blake, hey, we've got an ex-JCPennyman right here in Newport. He came in a few years ago and really made a big success of it. He doubled sales in his store and his Ben Franklin, the original one. And now he's got two stores and he's the president of the Chamber Commerce. So I actually should pause right there. This is, I think, the first reference in the book, but several times throughout the book, Sam either has formally or informally this collection of other people doing the same thing that he's doing, whether it's in”
2022-02-28 · Founders · #234 Sam Walton: Made In America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“10 years, might 15 years of the book of the founders I just did. Reed Hopman was talking about the idea for it to have a professional social network like 10 years before he found on LinkedIn. And so Sam Walton's demonstrating the same idea here. I began to mull over this idea in Newport, but it would take another 10 years before I took the idea seriously. He points out another trait that he has very early in his career that he uses, and it was very useful for when he's building Walmart. And that's the fact that he wakes up every day focused on improving something. So he says as good as a business this was in, or this was rather, I could never leave well enough alone. And in fact, I think my constant fiddling and meddling with the status quo may have been one of the biggest contributions to the later success of Walmart. And so now this is his brother Bud and his partner talking about the fact that Sam, even back then, Sam knew his business from A to Z. This is something he would do later at Walmart 2. That Newport store was really the beginning of where Walmart is today. We did everything. We would wash the window, sweep the floors. We did all the stockroom work, check the freight.”
2022-02-28 · Founders · #234 Sam Walton: Made In America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Time and which eventually changed the way retailers sell and customers buy all across America. I find out that by pricing it at a dollar I could sell three times more than by pricing it at $1.20. I might make only half the profit per item, but because I was selling three times as many, the overall profit was much greater. Simple enough. But this is really the essence of discounting. By cutting your price, you can boost your sales to a point where you can earn far more at the cheaper price than you would have by selling the item at the higher price. In retailer language, you can lower your markup but earn more because of the increased volume. So that's the central idea of Walmart, the central idea that he uses to build Walmart. And then he makes a comment that I've tried to point out to you over and over again. It's the fact that there's all these examples in these books where you'll have an idea and it just kind of sits and stews and you might not use that idea for five years.”
2022-02-28 · Founders · #234 Sam Walton: Made In America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so one of these deals is the fact that he buys women's underwear. And this is happening like a decade, like I said, a decade and a half before Walmart's even a thing. But he says right here, he's like, listen, I'll never forget one of the best items I ever had. And an early lesson I learned in pricing. It first got me thinking in the direction of what eventually became the foundation of Walmart's philosophy. If you're interested in how Walmart did it, this is one story you've got to sit up and pay close attention to. So they're selling the ladies' underwear for $2 a dozen. We've been buying similar panties from Ben Franklin's for $250 a dozen, and then we would sell them for three-pair for a dollar. So he's like, okay, well, I can buy them now 50%, or excuse me, 50 cents cheaper. So instead of selling three for a dollar, I can sell four for a dollar and it would make a great promotion for our store. And so this is exactly what he's going to do at Walmart later. He says, here's the simple lesson we learned. While others were learning at the same time.”
2022-02-28 · Founders · #234 Sam Walton: Made In America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then break them. So he says, I wasn't all that great at accounting in college, so I just did it according to their book. In fact, I used their accounting system long after I had started breaking the rules on everything else. At the very beginning, I went along and ran my store by their book because I really didn't know any better. But it didn't take long for me to start experimenting. And that's just the way I am and always have been. And so part of the rules he breaks is that you're supposed to buy the majority of your stuff you're selling in the store from corporate office. But he's like, I'm buying it from you guys, but I can go around and find all these little small suppliers and I'm getting way better deals. And so they started getting pissed off at them. So that was sort of a lot of these practice of the practices and philosophies that still prevail at Walmart today. I was always looking for offbeat suppliers or sources. I started driving over to Tennessee to some fellows I found who could give me special buys at prices way below what Ben Franklin was charging me. I've got to tell you this drove the Ben Franklin folks crazy.”
2022-02-28 · Founders · #234 Sam Walton: Made In America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To do it that it could be done, and why not go for it? Set that as a goal and see if you can achieve it. If it doesn't work, you've had fun trying. And so across the street from his little variety store, there's another store, and this is where I mentioned that he went to school and everybody. I learned a lesson that has stuck with me all through the years. You can learn from everybody. I didn't just learn from reading. I also learned the most from studying what John Dunham, he's talking about at this point in his career, John Dunham was doing across the street. And so his wife was talking about this part of Sam's career. She says, Sam was always over there checking on John, always looking at his prices, looking at his displays, looking at what was going on. He was always looking for a way to do a better job. So then he gets to the point that he's inside of a franchise system, which was very common at this time, and that he's just like, you could tell it's just not going to be a long-term solution for somebody like Sam Walton. So his advice, I think, would be learn the rules first so that you can break them later. He talks about his, he's like, I'm a Maverick, I love Mavericks, study the rules.”
2022-02-28 · Founders · #234 Sam Walton: Made In America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Realize now that I was the sucker sent there to save him. I was twenty-seven years old and full of confidence, but I didn't know the first thing about how to evaluate a proposition like this, so I just jumped right in with both feet. I bought it for twenty five thousand dollars. I had $5,000 of our own money that I'd saved, and I borrowed $20,000 from Helen's father. My naivete about contracts and such would later come back to haunt me in a big way. So remember that for later, okay, the fact that he signs this lease, not knowing much, and it's going to wind up coming back and haunting him in a big way. And then he gets into, again, the importance of setting a giant goal. You can think about this as Sam Walton's retail empire really starts off with just with one goal. Just make one store the best store there is. I've always believed in goals, so I sat one for myself. I wanted my little Newport store to be the best, most profitable variety store in Arkansas within five years. I felt I had the task.”
2022-02-28 · Founders · #234 Sam Walton: Made In America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so something Sam talks about over and over again is the fact that his opportunity came from a market that other people were just ignoring. All retailers at the time focused on giant cities. Walmart starts out where he lives his entire life and where he's building up Walmart is in these tiny towns. And what was interesting to me is that restriction actually was put on by his wife. And so he just made the most of it. And so this is what his wife Helen said. Sam, we've been married two years and we've moved 16 times. Now I'll go with you any place you want, so as long as you don't ask me to live in a big city, 10,000 people is enough for me. And so this is what Sam says about that. So any town with a population over 10,000 was off limits to the Waltons. If you know anything at all about the initial small town strategy that got Walmart going almost two decades later, you can see that this pretty much set the course for what was to come. She also said no partnerships. They were too risky. And she knew that because she saw what?”
2022-02-28 · Founders · #234 Sam Walton: Made In America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd fire you if you weren't such a good salesman. Maybe you're just not cut out for retail. So imagine telling Sam Walton he wasn't cut out for retail. So even when he's in the army, he's like, I need to study up because I know when I'm done with this, I'm going to go back into retail. And so he's somewhere out positioned somewhere out in Utah. And he says, I went to the library there and I checked out every book on retailing. I also spent a lot of my off-duty time studying the ZCMI, which was the Mormon Church's department store, just figuring that when I got back to civilian life, I would somehow go into the department store business. And that is really interesting. So he's a young man and he's spending his time not working visiting stores. There's Sam says it later on the book. He's like, I'm pretty sure that no one in the history of mankind has visited more retail stores than I have. Every day all over the world, no matter where I am, I'm going inside of stores and learning and seeing what they're doing.”
2022-02-28 · Founders · #234 Sam Walton: Made In America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I'm skipping ahead in the story. I want to get right to where he gets his first job. It's in retail. And he says the deal was pretty straightforward. I'd report to JCPenney Store in DMOR, Iowa three days after graduation. It was June 3rd, 1940, and I would begin working as a management trainee. My salary was $75 a month. That's the day I went into retail, and except for a little time out as an army officer, that's where I've stayed for the last 52 years. I love retail from the very beginning, and I still love it today. And now, this is one of my favorite anecdotes that I've ever read in any of these biographies. I've mentioned it too many times on past podcasts. It's where he starts out JCPenney. He's not good at his job. And this guy says the funniest thing. And it's funny because we see how his career turned out. And that part of things. I couldn't stand to leave a new customer waiting while I fitted with paperwork. Walton, Blake, would say to me.”
2022-02-28 · Founders · #234 Sam Walton: Made In America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The other side of that is dangerous. When you start doubting yourself, that is very dangerous. That is a direct quote from Arnold. When you start doubting yourself, that is very dangerous. One of the traits Sam had from an early age that we see appears over and over again is the fact that he was forced, he had dire economic circumstances, so he was forced to be self-reliant at an early age, and he just built on that talent and ran with it for the next 60 years of his life. Ever since high school, I'd made all my own money and paid for all my own clothes. This continued in college. Dad and mother would have been happy to help if they could have, but it was the depression and they had no extra money at all.”
2022-02-28 · Founders · #234 Sam Walton: Made In America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Into sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. One of the things I learned from Arnold Schrozinger, he would agree with that same thing. And he warns you about the danger of the reverse, right? So Sam saying, hey, it never occurred to me that I might lose. It was almost if I had a right to win, thinking like that seems to me.”
2022-02-28 · Founders · #234 Sam Walton: Made In America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Brilliant person. Whereas if you just take someone who is super determined and you take away smartness, eventually you get to a guy who owns a lot of taxi medallions or a trash hauling business but is still rich. And then he says an important note. It only takes one person of the founding team to be super determined. Back to the book. Sam Walton talks about what he learned from playing sports, playing team sports. And again, you get a sense of who this person was. It taught me to expect to win, to go into tough challenges, always planning to come out victorious. And then this sentence comes at the end of that same paragraph, and it's one of the, I'm working from the Kindle version. I have both of those, the paperback version and the Kindle of this book. That's how much I like it. And I'm working from the Kindle version right now. This is one of the most popular highlights in the entire book. And I love it. It says it never occurred to me that I might lose. To me, it was almost as if I had a right to win. Thinking like that often seems to turn.”
2022-02-28 · Founders · #234 Sam Walton: Made In America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Another important point he makes here I wasn't what you'd call a gifted student, but I worked really, really hard. That makes me think of Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator. He's seen, you know, what, thousands of startups at this point? I don't even know, a large number. And he came to the conclusion when people asked, okay, what's more, what feature is more important to business success? Intelligence or determination. And he gave this, it was in a speech. I think it's called a conversation with Paul Graham on the Y Combinator YouTube channel, if I'm not mistaken. But he gave this perfect example. And he's like, listen, if you start off with one person, actually, you know what? Let me just read you the entire quote instead of me giving you. I don't want to mess it up because it's the way he said it was fantastic. So he says, it turns out it's much more important to be determined than smart. If you imagine this hypothetical person that is 100 out of 100 for smart and 100 out of 100 for determination, and then you start taking away determination, it doesn't take long until you have this ineffectual but...”
2022-02-28 · Founders · #234 Sam Walton: Made In America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“something he repeats over and over again. He's clearly trying to give us advice on this goals, they should be so high that when you tell them to other people, people laugh. And then what I love about Sam is his ability to just, he gives entire lessons in just a sentence. He says, I've always had, and there's two examples here. This is the first one. I've always had a strong bias towards action, a trait that has been a big part of the Walmart story. And then this is the second lesson. This is, I remember this from the first time I read the book, and I've repeated it over and over again. I think it's really important to keep your ego. Your ego in drive, these are internal motivators. You can't, people don't like when you demonstrate your ego in public. And so he says, I learned a long time ago that exercising your ego in public is definitely not the way to build an effective organization.”
2022-02-28 · Founders · #234 Sam Walton: Made In America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now he's going to go into a little bit about his early life and something that's been with him since as long as he can remember, he says it is a fact that I have been overblessed with drive and ambition from the time I hit the ground. My mother was extremely ambitious for her kids, one of the great sadness in my life is that she died young of cancer just as we were beginning to do well in business. And then when I read this next paragraph I wrote to myself This is so important read it twice. Mother must have been a pretty special motivator because I took her seriously when she told me I should always try to be the best I could at whatever I took on. So I have always pursued everything I was interested in with a true passion. Some would say obsession to win. I have always held the bar pretty high for myself and I have set extremely high personal goals. So that last sentence thereabout, I've always said extremely high personal goals.”
2022-02-28 · Founders · #234 Sam Walton: Made In America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Company Frugality is mandatory. But then why would you, and he's asked, like, why do you keep this going even at this point when you're doing tens of billions of dollars in revenue, billions and billions in profit every year? I'm asked today when Walmart has been so successful when we're a $50 billion plus company, why do we stay so cheap? That's simple because we believe in the value of the dollar. We exist to provide value to our customers, which means that in addition to quality and service, we have to save them money. Every time Walmart spends one dollar foolishly, it comes right out of our customers' pockets. Every time we save them a dollar, that puts us one more step ahead of the competition. Remember these steps was being on top of the heap? So he says that puts us one more step ahead of the competition, which is where we always plan to be.”
2022-02-28 · Founders · #234 Sam Walton: Made In America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not ashamed, we're not ashamed of having money, but I just don't believe in a big showy lifestyle as appropriate for anywhere, least of all here in Bentonville, where folks work hard to further money and where we all know that everyone puts on their trousers one leg at a time. I'm sure if I ever really figured out, I'm not sure I ever really figured out the celebrity business. Why in the world, for example, would I get an invitation to Elizabeth Taylor's wedding out in Hollywood? I still can't believe it was news that I get my hair cut out of a barbershop. Where else would I get it cut? Why do I drive a pickup truck? What am I supposed to do? Haul my dogs around in a Rolls-Royce?”
2022-02-28 · Founders · #234 Sam Walton: Made In America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think about it. And so one of my favorite quotes that I've ever learned from doing this podcast is what Henry Ford said over 100 years ago. He says money comes naturally as a result of service. And when you're studying Sam Walton, you realize that, yeah, he's very rich, he's very happy he's rich, but he's focusing on the servicing of the customer. Think about how he ended the book. He's like, it's up to the customer. It's a success of your business.”
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“Of his business, and he says that you should just run your businesses if number one, you own 100% of it. Number two, it is the only asset in the world that you and your family have or will ever have. And number three, that you can't sell it for at least a century. And so Sam is writing about, hey, we're going to keep the stock. We're not trading our stock for yachts. And the future generation that's reading this, you guys better not mess up all the work I put in. So he says, Walmart stock is staying right where it is. We don't need the money. We don't need to buy a yacht. And thank goodness we never thought we need to go out and buy anything like an island. We just don't have those needs or ambitions, which wreck a lot of companies when they get along in years. Some families sell their stock off a little at a time and live high and then boom, somebody takes them over and it all goes down the drain. One of the real reasons I'm writing the book is so my grandchildren and great-grandchildren will read it years from now and know this. If you start any of that foolishness, I'll come back and haunt you. So don't even”
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“Minute, and so he says, My knowledge about money and finances wasn't all that sophisticated. Then I got to know Helen's family and listening to her father, L.S. Robson, was his name. Getting to know him was an education in itself. He influenced me a great deal. He was a great salesman, one of the most persuasive individuals I ever met. And I'm sure his success as a trader, and I am sure his success as a trader and a businessman, his knowledge of finance and the law, and his philosophy had a big effect on me. My competitive nature, this is really important that he included this though, his reaction to seeing someone else's success because there's a large contingent of humanity that have this crab in the bucket mentality. We got to avoid these people at all costs, right? And Sam has the exact opposite mentality. And in my opinion, the only corrected mentality to have. And he says, my competitive nature was such that I saw his success and admired it. I didn't envy it.”
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“The Great Depression. And so the point he makes repeatedly over and over again in the book, he's like, listen, it's a very difficult, it takes a lot of energy to make a dollar, so don't squander that energy. If you're giving your life force, your life energy, your time to making money, and then you get the money and you squander it, that means you squandered your life. So he says, I learned from a very early age that it was important for us kids to help provide for the home, to be contributors rather than just takers in the process, of course, we learned how much hard work it took you to get your hands on a dollar. And that when you did it, it was worth something. One thing my mother and dad shared completely was their approach to money. They just didn't spend it. And so then he gets into one of the most influential. There's a bunch of older influential people that Sam benefited very much knowing one of them happened to be his father-in-law. And so this is the first example in the book of a trait that Sam Walton had his entire life, something that Charlie Munger noticed about Sam Walton as he studied him. And I'll get to that in a minute.”
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“So, when he's writing this book, he might be the richest person in the world or in America. If not, he's one of the richest. He's definitely up there. So a lot of that has to talk about the fact that I think they own like 40-something percent of Walmart at this point, him and his family. He's just uncomfortable with the attention. He's like, they pay too much attention to my net worth and not enough attention to the actual valuable part, which is how the ideas and principles I use to build a business. And so he talks about, he's like, listen, I drive a truck. I get my haircut at a barbershop. I don't believe in wasting money. And I'm just being who I've always been. And people think I'm some strange creature. He says, no question about it. A lot of my attitude towards money stems from, and he's telling us why he doesn't. He's like, I'm not, I drive a pickup truck. I'm not into Bentley because I can't fit my hunting dogs in the Bentley. He's like, my truck gets me to where I'm going. Why would I need that? He says later on. He's like, why am I getting invited to Elizabeth Taylor's birthday? So he says, no question about it. A lot of my attitude towards money stems from growing up during a pretty hard scrabble time in our country's history.”
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“And then this is also one of my favorite lines in the entire book. He says at first, we amazed ourselves, and before too long, we amazed everybody else too. The Walmart story is unique, nothing quite like it has been done before, so maybe by telling it the way it really happened, we can help some other folks down the line take these same principles and apply them to their dreams and make them come true. And the note left myself after I read that paragraph is, God bless the founders that leave something for the next generation. Sam did not have to write this book. Maybe he wanted to write this book internally for Walmart executives, for his wife, for his family, his kids and grandkids, but he certainly didn't have to take all the time, especially when he's dying. The last days, think about how crazy this is. He died weeks after writing this. His last days were spent categorizing and organizing his knowledge so future generations can benefit. That is insane.”
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“others along the way with their determination, dedication, and commitment. All right, so let's go back to Sam's book. He's going to tell us a lot about maybe his main personality trait is that this guy's super or he was super competitive. If I had to single out one element in my life that has made a difference for me, it would be a passion to compete. That passion has pretty much kept me on the go looking ahead. And then he's going to hint on why so many people are going to be inspired by reading this book. And the note I left myself on this paragraph is he's got founder mentality. This is a story about believing in your idea even when some other folks don't. and about sticking to your guns. But I think more than anything, it proves there's absolutely no limit to what plane or ordinary working people can accomplish if they're given the opportunity and the encouragement and the incentive to do their best.”
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“A few times throughout the book, he mentions if he never had cancer, he doesn't know if he'd ever actually write the book. And so he says, none of this has really changed, meaning his perspective on this. But I've been fighting cancer for a while, and I'm not getting any younger anyway. And lately, a lot of folks, including Helen, that's his wife, and the kids and some of our executives here at the company and even some of our associates in the store have been fussing at me that I'm really the best person to tell the Walmart tale. And that, like it or not, my life is all wrapped up in Walmart and I should get it down right while I still can. And then he rewrites in my opinion, it's one of the best sentences in the entire book. And he says, when folks have asked me, how did Walmart do it? I've usually been flip about answering them. Friend, we just got after it and stayed after it. And so I would say it's impossible to read this book and not like Sam Walton. There's a great way to think about his approach to business. I talked about this blog post a few weeks ago. It's by this venture capitalist. His name.”
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“That answer is a little harder to figure out. I don't know exactly what I would do today, but I feel pretty sure I'd be selling something. Probably some kind of specialty retail. Something to do with computers, maybe, or something like the gap. Anyway, the next time some over-eager, slightly eccentric shopkeeper opens up a business in your neck of the woods, before you write them off too quickly. Remember those two old people who gave me sixty days to last in my store down in Fayetteville. Go check the new store out. See what they got to offer. See how they treat you, and decide for yourself if you ever want to go back. Because this is what it's really all about. In this free country of ours, that shopkeeper's success is entirely up to you the customer.”
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“A lot of folks ask me two related questions all the time. The first one is, could a Walmart type story still occur in this day and age? My answer is, of course it could happen again, somewhere out there right now, there's someone, probably hundreds of thousands of some ones with good enough ideas to go all the way. It will be done again over and over, providing that someone wants it badly enough to do what it takes to get there. It's all a matter of attitude and the capacity to constantly study and question the management of the business. The second question is if I were a young man or woman starting out today with the same sorts of talents and energies and aspirations that I had fifty years ago, what would I do?”
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